Posts Tagged ‘‘Progress’’

It seems the Torygraph will publish any old rubbish, not matter how hackneyed and obviously wrong, to undermine Jeremy Corbyn. Yesterday Mike put up a piece about an article in it, which claims that about 100 Labour MPs are in talks with potential donors about setting up a new ‘Progressives’ group in parliament if Corbyn stays on after a Tory landslide.

As Mike says, this is just the same old rumours that right-wing Labour MPs were planning to split the party that were circulating just before Corbyn won his second leadership election with a landslide.

He concludes

This is just a stupid smoke-and-mirrors bid to sap support for Jeremy Corbyn after Labour’s storming campaign launch and yet more blunders from ‘Team Terrible’ – I mean, Team Theresa.

I notice the name of the Torygraph reporter is ironically appropriate – C Hope? There’s no hope for Tories to see here.

A little while ago Florence, one of the great commenters on this blog, posted this remark about similar rumours of a Labour split:

It seems you may not have long to wait, as rumour has it that Blair is indeed trying to found a new party (or should that be a New Party?), with Sainsbury’s money being redirected from Progress to the New Blair Party. I have no doubt at all that this will claim to hold the middle ground as long as the ideals of neoliberalism seem centrist and “moderate”. I also have no doubt that this is yet another attack on the working people of the UK.

Let’s just stick with the current Labour party, that has promised to represent the 99%, and not the 1%?

My guess is that the Torygraph writer has heard some of these same rumours, and decided to repeat them as fact. It might be true that Blair wants to set up a new ‘Progressives’ party – the title of this new ‘moderate’ – read: neoliberal – group touted by the Torygraph seems to be based on ‘Progress’, the Blairite faction in Labour. Blair himself wants to return to British politics and was in the papers a week ago spouting on about how he wishes to spread ‘moderate’ politics.

I doubt he would have any chance of forming a new party. As Richard Seymour has pointed out in his book on Jeremy Corbyn, Progress is tiny numerically. It’s only causing trouble because its members have seized key position in the party. Furthermore, Blair himself is politically toxic, though like Thatcher he has no idea that he is long past his political sell-by date. Mike and Seymour in his book have pointed out that from 2002 to the end of their administration, Labour lost five million votes. He alienated voters with his right-wing policies.

And even some Tories despise him for reasons that are entirely right and correct. The Mail on Sunday columnist, Peter Hitchens, refers to him as ‘the Blair creature’ and voices his intense disgust at him for starting the needless wars in the Middle East which have cost so many brave men and women their lives and limbs.

My guess is that if the 100 Labour MPs did split off from Labour, it would result in them immediately losing their seats. The party would then be able to put up proper left-wing candidates, who would support Corbyn – or a suitably left-wing successor. These proper Labour MPs would then win the seats previously held by their Blairite predecessors.

But as Mike said, rumours of these splits have run before, and been wrong. The Blairite MPs themselves have been desperate to hold on to their nominations as Labour MPs by any means, fair or foul. We’ve seen whole local Labour parties suspended on trumped up charges because they’ve scared the Tom Watson and his minions by threatening to deselect their Blairite MP.

And Barry Davies, one of the long-term commenters over on Mike’s blog, raises the spectre of what happened to the SDP:

Well let’s honest if they “moderate’s” broke away what are they going to do, renew the social democrats?, start another party? join the lib dems, whatever they would be assured of losing their cushy jobs.

Yes, what did happen to the SDP? They were supposed to be about to break the mould of British politics. I can remember David Owen telling his troops to go back home and prepare for government.

It didn’t happen.

But he did get an invitation from Screaming Lord Sutch to join the Monster Raving Loony Party. Sutch said in his autobiography, Life As Sutch, that if Dr Owen had joined them, he’d be in government by now.

This looks like wishful thinking at best from the Torygraph. They’ve been one of the most venomous and persistent of Corbyn’s critics in the media. Possibly this is due to the paper’s very blatant right-wing bias, made worse by its ownership by the weirdo Barclay Twins, and desperation to ingratiate itself to potential advertisers by spiking stories that reflect badly on them. According to Private Eye, this prostration before the advertisers has resulted in readers leaving it in droves. I got the impression that this has resulted in mass sackings by doddery CEO Murdo McClellan and the Gruesome Twosome in order to keep the paper’s share price up.

Either way, it’s the Torygraph that’s in dire straits, not Labour. And hopefully one result of a Labour victory will be to utterly discredit the Telegraph and the other right-wing denizens of Fleet Street as influential opinion-formers.

The General Strike: Jackdaw No.l05, compiled by Richard Tames (London, New York and Toronto: Jackdaw Publications Ltd, Grossman Publishers Inc., and Clarke, Irwin and Company 1972)

I picked this up about 20 years ago in one of the bargain bookshops in Bristol’s Park Street. Jackdaw published a series of folders containing reproduction historical texts and explanatory posters and leaflets on variety of historical topics and events, including the Battle of Trafalgar, the slave trade, the voyages of Captain Cook, Joan of Arc, the Anglo-Boer War, the rise of Napoleon, Ned Kelley and Wordsworth. They also published another series of document folders on specifically Canadian themes, such as the Indians of Canada, the Fenians, Louis Riel, Cartier of Saint Malo, the 1867 confederation of Canada, the vote in Canada from 1791 to 1891, the Great Depression, Laurier, and Canada and the Civil War.

This particular folder is on the 1926 general strike, called by the TUC when the Samuel Commission, set up to report into the state of the mining industry, published its report. This recommended that the mines should be reorganised, but not nationalised, and although the miners were to get better working conditions and fringe benefits, they would have to take a pay cut. The folder included a poster giving a timeline of the strike and the events leading up to it, and photos of scenes from it, including volunteer constables practising self-defence, office girls travelling to work by lorry, the Conservative prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, and buses and train signal boxes staffed by volunteers. There’s also a Punch cartoon commenting on the end of the Strike. It also contains a leaflet explaining the various documents in the folder, along suggested projects about the issue and a short bibliography.

Poster and timeline of the Strike

Leaflet explaining the documents

The facsimile documents include

1. A leaflet arguing the Miner’s case.

2. Telegram from the Transport and General Workers’ Union to a local shop steward, calling for preparations for the strike.

3. Pages from the Daily Worker, the official paper of the T.U.C. during the Strike.

4. Notice from the Met calling for special constables.

5. Communist Party leaflet supporting the Strike.

6. Handbill giving the proposals of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the leaders of the Free Churches for an end to the Strike.

7. Handbill denouncing the strike as ‘The Great ‘Hold-Up’.
The accompanying pamphlet states that this was very far from the truth, and that it was a government lie that the T.U.C. were aiming at a revolution.

10. Contemporary Analysis of the causes of the Strike’s failure, from the Public Opinion.

11. The British Gazette, the government’s official paper, edited by Winston Churchill.

12. Anonymous letter from a striker recommending that the T.U.C. shut off the electricity.

13. Appeal for aid to Miner’s wives and dependents.

14. Protest leaflet against Baldwin’s ‘Blacklegs’ Charter’.

The General Strike was one of the great events of 20th century labour history, and its collapse was a terrible defeat that effectively ended revolutionary syndicalism and guild socialism as a major force in the labour movement. It left a legacy of bitterness that still persists in certain areas today.

The jackdaw seems to do a good job of presenting all sides of the issue, and the final section of the explanatory leaflet urges children to think for themselves about it. And one of the folder’s features that led me to buy it was the fact that it contained facsimile reproductions of some of the papers, flyers, letters and telegrams produced by the strikers arguing their case.

Looking through the folder’s contents it struck me that the strike and the issues it raised are still very much relevant in the 21 century, now almost a century after it broke it. It shows how much the Tories and the rich industrialists were determined to break the power of the unions, as well as the sheer hostility of the press. The Daily Express has always been a terrible right-wing rag, and was solidly Thatcherite and anti-union, anti-Labour in the 1980s. Since it was bought by Richard Desmond, apparently it’s become even more virulently right-wing and anti-immigrant – or just plain racist – than the Daily Heil.

The same determination to break their unions, and the miners in particular, was shown by Thatcher during the Miner’s Strike in the 1980s, again with the solid complicity of the media, including extremely biased and even falsified reporting from the BBC. It was her hostility to the miners and their power which partly led Thatcher to privatise and decimate the mining industry, along with the rest of Britain’s manufacturing sector. And these attitudes have persisted into the governments of Cameron and May, and have influenced Tony Blair and ‘Progress’ in the Labour party, who also bitterly hate the unions and anything that smacks of real working class socialism.

Lobster 70 also had some very interesting little snippets about the Israel lobby, and its connections to sections of the Labour party and the press, specifically ‘Progress’, and the Guardian.

‘Progress’ is the Blairite faction within the Labour party. In ‘Tittle-Tattle’ for that issue, Tom Easton praises Solomon Hughes in the Morning Star for his work investigating and exposing Progress and its dodgy donors. Hughes had written about the close connection between Tristram Hunt and David Sainsbury. As I’ve blogged previously, Sainsbury was a big corporate donor to the Labour party under Blair and Brown. He stopped funding the party as a whole when Ed Miliband became leader, but, according to Hughes, he continued funding Progress. Just as he continued funding the SDP rump under Dr David Owen after the rest of it had merged with the Liberals. One of the SDP’s members was Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee.

In November 2014 Hughes described Hunt’s speech at the previous Labour Conference, in which he made a joke about the secretive and numerically small nature of the faction, which did not go down well with the Progress hordes. He wrote

‘When I went to the Progress rally at the last Labour conference, Tristram Hunt was one of the speakers, where he declared he was “delighted to be with Progress” because “you might be an unaccountable faction dominated by a secretive billionaire, but you are OUR unaccountable faction dominated by a secretive billionaire”.

Here were two dozen true words spoken in jest. Hunt’s joke was so close to the bone that the shiny happy people of Progress — this is one of the biggest events on Labour’s fringe — seemed embarrassed into silence.

Hunt’s insistence that Progress was “the Praetorian Guard, the Parachute Regiment, the Desert Rats of Labour” also raised few laughs, even though the meeting took place in a Comedy Club at the edge of the Labour conference site. Even joking that Progress is new Labour’s shock troops was a bit too much.’

One of Progress’ board members is Patrick Diamond, who is a long-time associated of Peter Mandelson. He is the Vice-Chair of Mandy’s Policy Network, as well as frequently contributing columns to the Guardian. Progress’ president is Stephen Twigg, a former chair of Labour Friends of Israel. Progress’ chair, John Woodcock, the MP for Barrow and Furness, contributed the foreword to the Labour Friends of Israel’s The Progressive Case for Israel. And when it seemed Liz Kendall was about to don the mantle of leadership for New Labour, she got a positive press from the Jewish Chronicle. The week after Labour lost the election, the newspaper ran the headline, ‘Labour Must Now Pass the Israel Test’. Which shows just how close New Labour is to the Israel lobby. And in another item in the same column, Easton states that another former chairman of the LFI is Jim Murphy, the head of Scottish Labour. Which sheds yet more light on his determination to block Rhea Wolfson’s attempts to get on to the NEC. Murphy persuaded her local Labour party not to back her because of her links to that terrible anti-Semitic organisation, Momentum, despite the fact that they’re not, and Wolfson herself is Jewish.

A further item, ‘Grauniada’, also comments that that the Graun’s connections to Zionism goes back ‘to the early days of both’, noting that the newspaper itself had told the story of its relationship with Israel in 2008 when it published Daphna Baram’s Disenchantment: The Guardian and Israel. The same item also notes that Jonathan Freedland, one of the leading critics of Jeremy Corbyn, is also a columnist for the Jewish Chronicle.

All this shows the very strong connections between New Labour, the Labour Friends of Israel, and the Jewish Chronicle, and how they are absolutely united in their hatred of Jeremy Corbyn.

The same item in Lobster also speculates on how long the connection between the Graun and Zionism will survive, now that the new editor-in-chief is Katherine Viner. Viner and Alan Rickman produced a theatre production based on the diary entries and writings of Rachel Corrie. Corrie was the American peace activist, who was killed by bulldozer driven by the Israeli Defence Force in Gaza in 2003.

There’s also another section in that part of the magazine specifically about the Israel lobby. Most of the politicians reported in that item, ‘Israel Lobby News’, are Conservatives and Lib Dems, such as Eric Pickles, Nick Clegg’s head of communications, James Sorene, who went off to head BICOM, while local councillors elected in May that year were invited to join the Local Government Friends of Israel by Rachel Kaye, the Executive Director of We Believe in Israel. Kaye stated that the director of We Believe in Israel was Luke Akehurst, a former Labour councillor for Hackney, and had worked with Peter Mandelson’s former press secretary in the PR and lobbying firm Weber Shandwick.

Ruth Smeeth is one of the other Blairites, who made allegations of anti-Semitic abuse earlier this year. According to Wikipedia, she demanded that Corbyn resign, after Marc Wadworth, of Momentum Black Connexions, accused her of working ‘hand-in-hand with the right-wing media’. She claimed that this was a slur against her as someone of Jewish heritage, because it was linking her, as Jew, to a conspiracy theory. See the entry at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Smeeth

Easton, in his ‘Tittle-Tattle’ column in Lobster 68 for 2014 also reveals that she’s a member of Progress, the Blairite party-within-a-party, funded by David Sainsbury. She was also a former director of public affairs for another Israel lobby group, BICOM. A number of organisation have documented how BICOM are involved with the occupation of the West Bank and the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.

As was remarked at the time, if I recall correctly, her accusation is all about protecting the neoliberalist entryists in Labour and protecting the Israel lobby and its influence.

Also in the I newspaper today, right opposite the report about the three pro-Corbyn councillors, who have been suspended from the local party in Bristol, was the news that the Lib Dem leader Tim Farron has made a bid to win over right-wing Labour voters in his speech at their party conference.

The article states

Tim Farron cast himself as the heir to Tony Blair yesterday as he delivered a direct appeal to disillusioned Labour voters to switch allegiance to the Liberal Democrats.

Only his party can prevent a 25-year-long Conservative “stranglehold over government”, he insisted in his keynote speech to the Liberal Democrat conference in Brighton.

Mr Farron coupled praise for many of Tony Blair’s achievements in office with a stinging attack on Jeremy Corbyn for viewing winning general elections as a “bourgeois distraction”…

Targeting the centrist Labour supporters, the Lib Dem leader said he believed Mr Blair made many serious mistakes, but admired him for achievements such as investing in schools and hospitals and introducing the national minimum wage.

“I respect him for believing that the point of being in politics is to get stuff done, and you can only get stuff done if you win. Otherwise, you’re letting your opponent get stuff done instead, ” Mr Farron said.

Farron and his supporters are keen to promote the idea that the party is undergoing a revival after losing all but eight seats in the elections last year. The same article quotes him as saying that by next year, his party will be the only thing standing between another Tory election victory.

But Farron has already confirmed my negative opinion of his party, and my decision that I won’t vote for them. Tony Blair and his supporters aren’t centrists. By the standards of the 1980s, they’re actually extreme right-wing Tories. I don’t mean they’re extreme right in that they’re racist, misogynist or hate gays. They’re not. But they are extremely right-wing in that they took over Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberal policy of privatising everything she could, including parts of the NHS. Blair took this over and massively expanded it. Alan Milburn wanted to reduce the health service to a logo on services provided by the private sector. See NHS-SOS by Jacky Davis and Raymond Tallis. As for investing in hospitals, this is a moot point that needs qualification. Blair did invest in hospitals under the PFI initiative, a policy set up by that prancing snob Peter Lilley deliberately to open up the NHS to private investment. Under the PFI, the hospitals built are smaller than those constructed using conventional financing methods, and are actually much more expensive. These costs are met by closing and amalgamating other hospitals. Farron might consider these as mistakes, but they are an integral part of the system. Blair was responsible for closing down local hospitals in order to create a part-privatised system that was more wasteful than the previous, wholly state-owned, state-funded NHS. But it got him plaudits from the Right as the true anointed heir of Thatcher, barrels of money given to him and his continuity group, Progress, from donors in the private medical industry.

Much the same could be said of his education policy. This essentially consisted of the Simpering Scrounger taking over Norman Baker’s policy of city colleges outside the Local Education Authorities, which even the Tories ditched as a useless dud. Just as he did with Anderson Consulting, who had also been ditched by the Tories, Blair picked them up and adopted the policy as his own. The only difference is that he tried to make the wretched scheme look better by calling them ‘city academies’ and then just ‘academies’. Like the PFI hospitals, they’re massively more expensive than ordinary schools. They can cost something like £24-35 million, far more than the funding given to LEAs for all the schools they have to run. And like the PFI hospitals, it’s another part-privatisation where the taxpayer effectively picks up the bill. They’re given over to the management of second-rate entrepreneurs, often with extreme dodgy ideas on what counts as proper education. Poor, and children with exceptional needs, like the less academic, or disruptive pupils, are not taken, or expelled at an alarming rate in order to keep the wealthy, intellectually able kids the schools needs to show they’re improving standards. But they don’t. They’re actually little better than state schools. Where they have improved standards, it’s simply due to the vastly larger funding they’ve been given. These would have also improved standards in state schools, if they had been so fortunate as been given them. See Francis Beckett’s The Great City Academy Fraud.

The only person, who’s shown a genuine commitment to restoring standards and the integrity of our schools and health service, after these have been decimated by nearly four decades of Tory and New Labour misrule, is Jeremy Corbyn. By aiming to win the Blairites over to his party, Farron has shown that he effectively supports all the policies Blair and the Tories have done ever since Maggie. The rise of mass starvation in our society, and the incalculable poverty, disease and despair that will result if the Tories’ privatisation of the NHS goes ahead, show that these are policies are country cannot afford. Like the Tories, the Lib Dems should not be given any power in forthcoming elections.

Paul Mason on Saturday posted a long, but excellent piece discussing the way the elite were changing their tactics from attacking Jeremy Corbyn, to attacking his support group, Momentum. This followed the appearance of an article in the Times about the group’s supposedly dodgy activities in Liverpool, based on an anonymous dossier put together from a Labour member, who had visited their chatrooms. He quotes right-wing blogger Guido Fawkes and the Time’s editorial about how Momentum are really cuckoos in Labour’s metaphorical nest, seeking to infiltrate and take over the party. Mason points out that two other films are also scheduled to attack Corbyn and Momentum this week, and notes the way the story being peddled by the Blairites and the elite has changed. Whereas before it was just Corbyn and a few members of Momentum who were infiltrators, with Smudger demanding the right to address their rallies alongside Corbyn, in a speech last week Smudger equated Momentum with Militant Tendency in the 1980s, and almost suggested that Momentum should similarly be thrown out of the party as Militant was.

Mason points out how ridiculous the comparison is, and compares the open and democratic structure of Momentum with both Militant and the Blairite successor group, Saving Labour. He writes

With 18,000 members Momentum is four times bigger than the Militant Tendency ever was, even at the height of its influence in the mid-1980s. Momentum is organising The World Transformed — an open, free, largely unstructured culture and ideas festival alongside Labour conference in Liverpool as a way of attracting non-party activists and local young people. The organisers have arranged open press access and gained sponsorship from two Labour-affiliated unions and a major NGO. Indeed until last week their main problem was convincing the press to cover it.

Militant, by contrast, was a rigid grouping, with two layers of secrecy, an internal command/control structure and an elected leadership along Bolshevik lines. It operated like this because that is how the Labour right operated. It was in some ways a mirror image of the bureaucratic hierarchy it tried to oppose.

Today, that is still how the Labour right organises: Saving Labour, for example, is a website co-ordinating attacks on Corbyn which has still not reveal who funds it or owns it. Labour Tomorrow is collecting funds from rich donors for purposes as yet unannounced. It has no publicly accountable structures at all. Momentum, by contrast, is an open and democratic group.

Mason states that the intention behind these stories is to begin a witch hunt against Momentum if Corbyn loses. If, on the other hand, he wins, it’s to form the basis of the Blairite’s legal campaign to gain the party’s name, bank account and premises on the basis that these had been illegally stolen by infiltrators. He notes also that these attacks on Momentum itself are based on the failure of the attempts to uncover dirt and smear Corbyn himself. Corbyn is popular with the party’s grassroots and his views poll well with the public.

Mason feels the solution would be to make Momentum and Progress, their Blairite opponents, affiliated sections of the Labour party so that their members become Labour members, and are subject to Labour party rules. But this would need a change in the party’s regulations. He is happy to see anyone become a member of Momentum, though, provided they don’t campaign for rival parties like the TUSC, the Greens and SNP. But Mason also believes that Labour members also need to join Greens, Left nationalists, anti-political people and even Lib Dems in grassroots campaigns on issues like Grammar schools. He also makes the point that the reason why Momentum grew so rapidly after Corbyn was in reaction to the dull, hierarchical and very bureaucratic structure of the existing party, and particularly hostility by the Blairites.

He goes on to make the following recommendations on what the party needs to do to attack the government and counter its policies:

•to de-select the (hopefully few) MPs who insist on actively sabotaging and abusing Corbyn;
•to bring forward a new “A-list” of candidates — more representative of the class, gender, ethnic and sexual-orientation of the UK population than the present PLP;
•passing coherent radical policies Labour Conference 2017 and the next National Policy Forum;
•deepening the left’s majority on the NEC and reversing the purge;
•focusing activist resources into geographical areas where the official party is weak;
•and turning Labour’s regional structures from anti-left “enforcement” operations into local networks of co-ordination to fight the Conservatives.

Mason states that Social Democrats in the Labour party should defend it as one of the remaining elements of the party’s Left wing, going back to the Clarion newspaper in the 1920s. And he also makes this point that it can be seen that it is not a far left movement can be seen from the fact that the true far left parties don’t like it:

And one of the clearest indicators that Momentum is a genuine, democratic formation is that the surviving far left — the SWP and Socialist Party–stand separate from it and their leaderships are wary of it. This suits me — because I have no sympathy for the bureacratic and hierarchical culture of Bolshevik re-enactment groups; it is precisely the open-ness, cultural diversity and networked outlook of Momentum, and the generation of youth drawn to it, that terrifies them.

He further argues that Social Democrats should support it, even if they disagree with its policies, as it has prevented the Labour party from undergoing a process similar to the collapse of PASOK in Greece, where the party has been ‘hollowed out’ and replaced by a party of the far left.

He concludes

The bottom line is: Momentum has a right to exist within the Labour Party and its members have a right to be heard.

If you’re a member of it, the best way to survive the upcoming red scare will be to smile your way through it. This is the tinfoil hat moment of the Labour right, as it realises half a million people cannot be bought by the money of a supermarket millionaire.

So get out the popcorn. You’re about to see what happens to the neo-liberal wing of Labour — and its propaganda arm — when the workers, the poor and the young get a say in politics.

I think Mr Mason’s exactly right about all this. He is certainly is about the highly centralised, and rigidly hierarchical nature of the real parties of the Far Left – the Communists and Trotskyites. Parties like these, such as the SWP and the Socialist Party, have a very un-democratic party structure based around Lenin’s doctrine of ‘Democratic Centralism’. In order to prevent the party splitting up into various competing factions, Lenin stipulated that the party must be organised around the leadership of committed revolutionaries, who would be responsible for laying down policy. These could be questioned up to a point, but the moment the leadership took a decision, further debate was outlawed and absolute obedience demanded from the members. There is also a very rigid attitude to party doctrine. Only the leaders’ view of Marxist ideology is considered authentic and conforming to objective reality. Any opposition to it is labelled a ‘deviation’ and its supporters purged, very much like heretics from a religious group. Stalin clawed his way to power by fighting a series of campaigns against his opponents in the party, who were labelled ‘deviationists’ of the Left and Right. When Tito in Yugoslavia decided he wanted to purge Milovan Djilas, one of the architects of workers’ control, he accused him of ‘anarcho-syndicalist deviationism’.

As for the opaque nature of Saving Labour’s funding, my guess is that much of it comes from big business and the Israel lobby. This isn’t an anti-Semitic smear. Blair was funded by the Zionists through Lord Levy and David Sainsbury. It’s because the Zionist lobby is massively losing support through the BDS movement, which is also supported by many Jews fed up with Israel’s persecution of the Palestinians, that the Zionists in the Labour party have accused Corbyn and his supporters of anti-Semitism. My guess is that Saving Labour won’t reveal who funds them because it would show their opponents to be right about their connection to the rich and to the Israel lobby.

I really couldn’t let this latest example of sheer lunacy from Smudger go. It just provides so much light on how he and the Blairites think, or at least, believe they can maker the rest of us think. It also makes you wonder how someone, who is so stupid or misinformed to believe that, can ever hope to present himself as political dynamo. As Kryten from Red Dwarf said of Arnold J. Rimmer, ‘Oh for a world class psychiatrist!’

Mike put up this evening a little piece reporting that Owen Smith, the Blairite challenger for the Labour leadership, told the world on Twitter that he thinks Momentum are a rebranding of the Militant Tendency, the Trotskyite group that infiltrated the Labour party in the 1980s. Why? Because Militant wasn’t subtle, and both Militant and Momentum begin with the same letter: ‘M’.

Mike sent up this piece of false logic by stating that his name also begins with ‘M’. How long before he too was rumbled? So he’s joked about changing it to Pharquar, with a ‘P’. That should appeal to Smudger as a Blairite. It begins with the same letter as the Blairite party-within-a-party, Progress. Oh yes, and Smudger’s old employers, Pfizer.

I’m left wondering if Smudger really is that thick, or whether it’s a lie to smear Corbyn in the minds of ordinary people, who are less well-informed politically. Militant Tendency aren’t Momentum. They’ve formed their own, separate party, called the Socialist Party. As for the similarity between the two names, because the share the same first letter, well, there are very many things that begin with ‘M’, as Mike himself points out. Like ‘M’, James Bond’s boss in the movies. Or child-murderer in Fritz Lang’s silent classic, M, from 1920s Germany, who was chillingly played by Peter Lorre. Perhaps Smudger also believes that Momentum is entirely made up of bug-eyed German serial killers, when not at their desks in their day job of ordering suave super-spies to combat villainous multi-millionaires trying to take over the world. Is this how the Blairites think of the Old Labour left? Do they think Corbyn, in private, takes off a mask to reveal himself as looking like Donald Pleasance or Charles Grey, wearing a Nehru-collared suit and stroking a white cat, as he giggles at his plan to incinerate the Earth from space-based lasers? Strange. Every time I’ve seen Corbyn on TV, he hasn’t been surrounded by goons in orange jump suits, and I’m fairly certain his constituency office isn’t located in a secret base inside an extinct Japanese volcano, or in an orbiting space station. Or in a secret laboratory under the Caribbean.

I do think I know where he got this bizarre idea, however. Looking through the Cheltenham branch of Waterstone’s the other week, I found on the shelves a book about Militant Tendency. And on the back was a series of approving comments, including one which said it would help anyone now trying to understand Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour party. This is part of the general line being pushed by the Labour right and its cheerleaders in the media, that Corbyn is a Trot and an infiltrator. He’s no such thing, of course, but that isn’t stopping them from repeating this calumny.

It also shows how, despite any protests they might make to the contrary, they’re also following Hitler’s advice on propaganda. It’s ironic, considering the way John MacDonald has been suspended from the party, because he dared to repost a picture of Dave Cameron as Adolf Hitler, along with a quote from the Fuhrer about taking away people’s freedoms tiny piece by tiny piece, so that they don’t realise what’s going on and can’t protest. There’s another quote from Adolf, or Goebbels, I can’t remember which, about making people believe in the One Big Lie. This runs that it doesn’t matter how stupid or false the lie is, you stick to your guns and repeat it as loudly and often as possible, until the majority of people believe you.

And this is exactly what Smudger and the rest of the Blairites are doing, trying to link Momentum with Militant Tendency and Trotsky.

It’s disgraceful, but what can you expect from someone, who was a PR man working for one of the big drugs companies when they were very keen to have the NHS privatised.

This is another video from Jimmy Dore, an American comedian and political commentators, whose been a regular guest on The Young Turks. In this video, he discusses an interview The Turks’ roving reporter, Jordan Cheriton, had with an elderly lady, who described her experience of being denied medical cover until she finally got Medicare. Medicare is the American system, in which the state pays for the healthcare of those too poor to have private medical insurance. This lady was denied private health insurance because she had a pre-existing condition: asthma. She only got medical cover through Medicare after thirty years or so without it.

Cheriton met her at a meeting of the supporters of Grayson, the progressive Democrat candidate for Florida, who’s one of those following in the footsteps of Bernie Sanders. Sanders was the self-described ‘Democratic Socialist’, who wanted to introduce universal healthcare in America, and whose bid for the presidency was blocked by Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the Democrat party machine. This lady and Dore attack the opponents of state healthcare, who accuse its supporters amongst the younger generation of ‘having it too easy’ and not knowing anything about the real world. One of those is Shrillary. Dore has a clip of her from earlier this year, voicing her opinion that state medicine is impractical, and ranting that ‘it will never happen’. One of Dore’s producers points out that back in the 1990s, she was in favour of universal state-paid healthcare, until the cheques from private enterprise came in. Dore is also suitably scathing about the charge that universal single-payer healthcare is ‘utopian’ in Hillary’s words, when the rest of the world has it. The lady at the meeting, and in the later interview with Cheriton, states that she’s glad the young people support state healthcare, and wants the old politicians who oppose it to move aside so they can come through.

Here’s the video:

I’m putting this up because this is the reality of the American healthcare system. Robin Cook in his pamphlet on the NHS for the Fabian Society nearly thirty years ago pointed out that private medicine discriminates against people with long-standing illness, because of the greater expense of treating them. They concentrate on covering relatively healthy people, who they can make a profit from, as they don’t need to pay out so often. And, of course, private insurance only works if you can afford, which 20 per cent of Americans can’t due to escalating medical bills.

This is the system which Thatcher, Blair, Brown, Cameron and now Theresa May want to introduce in Britain. This is why Jeremy Hunt has described the NHS as ‘an abomination’, and the Tories are manufacturing a funding crisis in the NHS. They’re doing so because they’ve also got connections to private healthcare firms, and the American healthcare companies are seeking to expand because of growing dissatisfaction over that side of the Pond with private healthcare. Over half of Americans now want a state healthcare system, like Canada and the rest of the world.

Don’t have any illusions on this score about New Labour wishing to support the NHS. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown laid much of the foundations for the continuing Tory privatisation of the health service, but were determined not to let anyone know, as, like Thatcher before them, they realised that it would lose them the election. This is the healthcare system that New Labour – Progress, Tomorrow’s Labour, Saving Labour and the other Blairite shills support. It’s why the Conservative media have put so much into attacking Corbyn, as he threatens to undermine it and their corporate masters by renationalising the NHS.

Don’t give your vote to them or the Tories. Defend the NHS, and support Corbyn, while there’s still time.

On a different issue, I notice one of the guys listening to her speak is a young Asian bloke wearing an ‘Islamic Relief’ T-shirt. He’s obviously a religious Muslim, who takes serious the obligation under Islam to provide alms to the poor. Many British Muslims also do. My parents met one young Muslim lady doing the same when giving to the local food bank. I guess she and he must be the horrendous Muslims coming to destroy British society in advance of ISIS. (Sarcasm). It’s been pointed out again and again that immigrants are actually net contributors to society, as they actually pay more in taxes than they take out. But this gets forgotten in the racist hysteria.

Mike a few days ago published a piece criticising the allegations of corruption against civil liberties activist, Shami Chakrabarti, for accepting the nomination of a life peerage by Jeremy Corbyn. Ms Chakrabarti was called in by the Labour leader to investigate the claims of institutional racism and anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. Chakrabarti did, and found that the party was no more racist or anti-Semitic than the others, and that the allegations were largely unfounded. She did make a few recommendations to prevent racist incidents occurring, and deal better with complaints about them when they arose.

This, however, appears to have been too much for the Conservatives and the Blairites, who seem to be desperate for there to have been anti-Semitism and racism bedevilling the party. And so they’ve started accusing Chakrabarti of corruption. Mike reported how this has been going on for over a month, and that Ms Chakrabarti was forced to deny the allegation against her and Corbyn on the Andrew Marr show on Sunday.

He also points out, using a meme he found on-line, the double standard involved. One of those David Cameron recommended for a peerage is his wife’s hair-stylist. Several others have been Tory donors. But there’s been hardly a peep about that from the largely supine right-wing press. That’s clear corruption, of the kind Private Eye used to expose twenty or so years ago. And one of the most flagrant abusers of the honours system was Tony Blair. And if we’re on the subject of genuinely morally corrupt lawyers, much could be said about Cherie. She and her law firm, Matrix Chambers, claimed to be human rights lawyers, but she ended up defending some of the nastiest, most brutal tyrants and exploitative companies. The Blairites of Progress have no problem with her, but the spectacle of a genuine and respected human rights lawyer getting a reward has sent them into a fury.

This is really disgusting, and shows how low the right-wing media and the Blairites will stoop in their determination to smear Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters and allies.

Mike yesterday also put up a very interesting piece reporting the claim by Paul Mason, a journalist and now Labour activist, that the Blairites had timed the coup against Jeremy Corbyn because they were very much afraid that it was capable of winning the next election. Mr Mason was speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Broadcasting House, alongside Rhea Wolfson. Ms Wolfson is the lady, who was elected to the NEC with the backing of Momentum. But not before Jim Murphy, the head of the Scottish Labour party, had tried to stick the knife in her back by telling her constituency party not to support her, because through Momentum she was connected with anti-Semitism, if I remember correctly. She also agreed that Labour could win an election if they are able to mobilise the vast numbers of people who have joined the party.

Mason is the former economics editor for Newsnight. He said

“I think Jeremy Corbyn will win. Or, let’s put it this way, he will be in a position to form a government.

“That, of course, is what the Labour rebels were worried about on the day after Brexit. Remember the sequence of this. It looked like there was going to be an early general election with the Tories in disarray.

“They texted each other saying ‘this is our last chance, otherwise the guy has the chance of leading the party into an election and that election is winnable”.”

Mike states that if this is true, then it shows that everyone, who claimed to be opposing Corbyn because he was ‘unelectable’ was consciously lying. He challenges them to explain themselves, and urges everyone else to start doing some deselecting of their own.

I’ve described the Blairites as ‘Thatcherite entryists’. It’s how several of the commenters on this blog have described them, and it’s exactly right. Blair and the rest of New Labour were Thatcherite to the core, and brought into the party a whole range of individuals and think tanks, who are really part of the free market right.

And if this is correct, then they are literally behaving as entryists. One of the goals of various Communist factions that have historically tried to infiltrate democratic, reformist socialist parties, like Labour, is not just to make them increasingly radical and therefore platforms for their own clandestine seizure of power, but also to disrupt and destroy them as rivals to their own parties. During the 1919 Council Revolution, the Communists of the Spartacus League attempted to infiltrate the Independent German Social Democrat Party, or USPD. The USPD was much further to the Left of the main German socialist party, the SPD, but they weren’t Communists. By infiltrating them, the Spartacists hoped that they could destroy the USPD from within, and radicalise its most ‘advanced’ members into becoming Communists and joining them.

The Thatcherites of New Labour haven’t quite gone so far as trying to get a section of the party’s membership to join the Tories, but they have appealed to the Tories and Lib Dems to join to stop Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters from gaining power in the party.

Despite the rants against them by the Blairite leadership, Corbyn’s followers are not ‘Trotskyites’. Neither are they ‘scum’ or any of the other unpleasant epithets they’ve had hurled at them. I put up a piece by George Galloway last week, in which he stated very clearly why the new members of the party, who’ve joined because of Corbyn, aren’t followers of Leon Trotsky.

But Tony Blair and his coterie, and their successors in Progress, Labour First and Tomorrow’s Labour, are Thatcherite entryists. They have absolutely no business being in the Labour party, and blocking the genuinely socialist, traditional Labour policies of a popularly elected leader with a mandate from the majority of members. They should leave, and find their true home in the Tories.